The present disclosure relates to identifying applications to be run in computing systems.
Various techniques have been employed to accurately identify software applications to be run in computing systems. For example, GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) have been used for applications, where a GUID is simply a number assigned to an application in such a manner that it is guaranteed to be different from all other GUIDs. In many cases, however, such GUIDs can be readily stolen, and other applications can claim to be the same application by providing the same GUID. To add cryptographic security to an application identifier, the Flash® player (available from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif.) includes support to identify an application based on the hash of the SWF (Shockwave Flash) making up the application. In this case, when the application changes, the hash identifier can change also, even if the application change is only a minor update to the code.